Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

110 SCENES OF STARING
Figure 8.2. Vince Maggiora, San Francisco Chronicle. David Roche talks to seventh-
and eighth-grade students after an assembly at White Hill Middle School in Fairfax,
California (1999).
supposedly grim and dire commonality. Of the waiting room, Roche avows,
“I was never more conscious of my disfigurement.” The waiting room leads
to the medical theater, which isolates Roche from even his supposed fellow
sufferers. In the interest of scientific progress and in exchange for excellent
medical treatment, Roche has made a Faustian bargain by agreeing to
display his face as a pathological specimen before a team of doctors. The
exposure in the medical amphitheater and the photographs made in the
examination room generate “conflicting feelings” of “shame mixed with
a bit of exhibitionism.” He has seen faces in medical photographs before,
recognizing in them a “look of dissociation and fear, helplessness and resignation”
but also “the glow of anger.” “They are the eyes,” he tells us, “of
people like me, who also were specimens on display.” In the actual medical
theater where Roche is presented before a team of diagnosticians, a flurry
of looks and expressions are exchanged. Upon entering the amphitheater
full of starers, Roche stares back to “observe and classify them according
to facial expression and posture.” Staring at them staring at him, he
notes: “Physicians and dentists are drawn back, more objective and assessing.
Social workers nod to convey their understanding and warmth. They
seek eye contact. Surgeons have the least emotional affect. They peer more
closely, with narrowed eyes that search incessantly, not for eye contact but